Ninja, The problem job and some ideas to change it.

[Darkstride]

If Armor Crush were "fused" into Aeolian Edge, then Aeolian, without question, would keep Huton refreshed 100% of the time while also being your highest damage combo finisher. That basically removes an entire job mechanic and travels into braindead territory. Why bother? Let's just go all out and just remove Huton and "fuse" it into NIN's permanent attack speed? This suggestion begins to oversimplify the job.

The only way I could see this suggestion being viable is if the effect were dependent on positioning. If Aeolian Edge hits from the rear, you get added damage, if it hits on the flank, you add Huton duration. However, even if that were to happen, you would have to look at other jobs that share the same types of positional bonuses and effects. Has NIN been simplified in comparison?

Personally I see no reason for a change to Armor Crush. As others have stated, it gets pretty consistent use, certainly more than once every 70 seconds. That's common knowledge. If you're waiting that long to use it, you're losing Huton and recasting it at some point. It doesn't completely refresh Huton, it just adds 30 seconds.

[Liam_Harper]

The only way I could see this suggestion being viable is if the effect were dependent on positioning. If Aeolian Edge hits from the rear, you get added damage, if it hits on the flank, you add Huton duration. However, even if that were to happen, you would have to look at other jobs that share the same types of positional bonuses and effects. Has NIN been simplified in comparison?

I'd be ok with that.

Mechanically it's the same, you just have one less button bloating your bars. In trade off for less buttons, you must hit from the flank with this change (currently an Armor Crush from anywhere will give Huton).

[Shamox]

Armor Crush and Aeolian Edge are literally the two abilities that makes Ninja's rotation what it actually is, a rotation where you get to make a choice.
It is also one of the rewarding aspects of the job and opens to optimization.

Forcing the positionals to actually get 30sc of huton would just be bad.
There are a lot of cases where you simply can't go for a positional, forcing it would just make the whole thing clunky, you'd have to take risks and rely on your tanks and stuff.
Tl;dr: It would actually make it harder.

Also, it's too soon to complain about having too many buttons.

[Shurrikhan]

Aeolian Edge doesn't carry any special effect (not including position bonus) unlike Shadow Fang and Armor Crush, it just hits hard, but compared to the other two you could argue it could use a secondary special effect so again my idea stands, it can absorb Armor Crush and kill two birds with one stone. I personally don't see any of your arguments making sense, it's like you want the class to be clumsy for the sake of it being clumsy, because it doesn't add more skill. You're not a better ninja because you have to work in a 3rd rotation of the weapon skills. My idea improves your DPS where as keeping armor crush as it is only hurts your DPS over all.

Since when is dealing more direct damage than its alternatives not already a wholly unique effect among its tier? It pairs far better with Duality than Armor Crush or Shadow Fang, providing about a third of the job's overall macrorotational complexity and a huge portion of its compromise-based decisions. That's probably a far deeper addition to gameplay than if we slapped a massive secondary effect toolkit onto the skill, yet failed to give it a stark advantage on cooldown around which to time TCJ, choose whether to clip slightly for bonus potency, and pace our rotational strings.

And NIN doesn't need its DPS improved. Apart from a double-Ranged DRG and Bard, it's been solidly a top performer for rDPS across SB, and was the strongest boon to both late ARR and HW compositions.

Even if it did, that shouldn't come with arbitrarily added gameplay changes. Any changes to gameplay should come from flaws in gameplay, not general balance concerns.

[Kabooa]

If Armor Crush were "fused" into Aeolian Edge, then Aeolian, without question, would keep Huton refreshed 100% of the time while also being your highest damage combo finisher. That basically removes an entire job mechanic and travels into braindead territory. Why bother? Let's just go all out and just remove Huton and "fuse" it into NIN's permanent attack speed? This suggestion begins to oversimplify the job.

It's funny because this is a pretty realistic prediction for 5.0. Stuff gets rolled into other stuff that's basically baked into muscle memory at this point to make room for new considerations and mechanics.

[Ultima]

If Armor Crush were "fused" into Aeolian Edge, then Aeolian, without question, would keep Huton refreshed 100% of the time while also being your highest damage combo finisher. That basically removes an entire job mechanic and travels into braindead territory. Why bother? Let's just go all out and just remove Huton and "fuse" it into NIN's permanent attack speed? This suggestion begins to oversimplify the job.

The only way I could see this suggestion being viable is if the effect were dependent on positioning. If Aeolian Edge hits from the rear, you get added damage, if it hits on the flank, you add Huton duration. However, even if that were to happen, you would have to look at other jobs that share the same types of positional bonuses and effects. Has NIN been simplified in comparison?

Personally I see no reason for a change to Armor Crush. As others have stated, it gets pretty consistent use, certainly more than once every 70 seconds. That's common knowledge. If you're waiting that long to use it, you're losing Huton and recasting it at some point. It doesn't completely refresh Huton, it just adds 30 seconds.

I think Huton should be made passive because it's annoying to constantly refresh it out of battle before a pull because the tank is slow and it just makes pointless maintenance in-combat to have to use Armor Crush to refresh it.

But, perhaps a compromise? Huton should reset to 70s while you're out of battle and begin ticking once you're in combat.


Honestly, if I was to change something about NIN it'd be how you need Suiton to apply SATA, it's pointless busywork and it feels very clunky, the entire mudra system is pretty terrible, but I'd not try to rip the whole thing up - just the parts that are really bad like having to refresh Huton out of battle or applying Suiton when one hiccup of lag or misclick will drop your main reason to exist (applying Trick Attack).

Edit: Let Mudras be weaved like other oGCDs, that's a suggestion I saw and it is how Mudras should've always worked in my opinion.

[Capn_Goggles]

I'm inclined to agree that ninja suffers from a few bad design points. Trick attack assures that Ninja will nearly always remain meta, as well as physical DPS in general, but it's so vital to ninja that any nerf to trick attack would immediately take ninja from god to nearly useless. Mudras are the real pain point though, due to their absurd dependency on ping to actually function properly. The ideal solution to mudras beyond outright removing them, is to change it so they register on the client side rather than the server side. Ten-chi-jin is also turbo-crap though because it plants NIN into place and forces it to use its worst pain point exclusively.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm inclined to agree that ninja suffers from a few bad design points. Trick attack assures that Ninja will nearly always remain meta, as well as physical DPS in general, but it's so vital to ninja that any nerf to trick attack would immediately take ninja from god to nearly useless. Mudras are the real pain point though, due to their absurd dependency on ping to actually function properly. The ideal solution to mudras beyond outright removing them, is to change it so they register on the client side rather than the server side. Ten-chi-jin is also turbo-crap though because it plants NIN into place and forces it to use its worst pain point exclusively.

They're not unique in that regard though; they're just the most obvious manifestation of the problem. The half-second animation time really should be enough time for the game to be able to register what mudra has/have been loaded. I don't know if its waiting until the tail of the animation to apply the actual buff (despite predictive change to Ninjutsu on the client screen -- only to be reverted a step or two on high-latency release), or if it's sending to server, returning, and then checking again with each successive buff, or what, but it needs to be coded in such as way that has less delay.

[Grimoire-M]

To me, the simplest solution really is to allow the use of GCDs between mudras. NIN would flow a lot better, especially with TCJ, which could be reworked to be able to be used on the move and thus be spaced out through a standard combo. Similarly you could do the same with Kassatsu usage. Rabbit could even be kept by making it trigger if you use 4 or more mudras, which is easily avoidable.